National Parents Organization improves the lives of children and strengthens society by protecting every child's right to the love and care of both parents after separation or divorce. We seek better lives for children through family court reform that establishes equal rights and responsibilities for fathers and mothers.

On July 4th, Don’t Forget the Parenting Challenges of Military Personnel During Holiday Celebrations

By ROB HOLDSWORTH

As the summer rolls on to July, American thoughts traditionally turn toward celebration of our original 13 colonies’ Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776.

Historically, our country has observed the Fourth of July with patriotic displays praising our nation's heritage, laws, history, society and people. Celebrations often include praise for the efforts of service members throughout American history as well as those engaged in current operations in support of U.S. national security and public safety. A sad consequence that is endured with alarming frequency by our nation’s military and first responder communities is to find that their service is often used against them during separation or divorce proceedings, resulting in the imposition of onerous parenting plans in family court.

Military and First Response personnel often endure long periods of duty under dangerous and stressful conditions. Adversarial co-parents find these job requirements to be fertile ground for justifying the loss of parental rights by our nation’s emergency response personnel.

Kentucky’s recent House Bill 528, which will create the nation’s first state law presuming 50/50 shared parenting when it goes into effect this month, includes a lesser known provision to ensure that any court-ordered temporary modification of a child custody decree, based in whole or in part on the active duty of a parent as a member of the Armed Forces deployed outside the US or federal active duty of a parent as a member of a state National Guard or a Reserve component shall be temporary and shall revert back to the previous permanent child custody decree at the end of the deployment or the federal active duty, as appropriate.

This is welcome news for the children of service members to help ensure that one parent’s temporary duty doesn’t result in the permanent loss of parenting time; however, it doesn’t go far enough to protect the parental relationships of children blessed with parents engaged in full-time public service.

Another consequence of military and first response service is powerful mental and emotional stress that frequently requires treatment. In family court, a public servant who has sought therapy for this sort of stress is penalized by opposing parties who seek to use the after-effects of their service as justification to limit parenting time. The same ex-partners who usually celebrated their ex’s service and profited from the increased pay and benefits accruing to those service members who perform extra duty, too often use the foreseeable consequences of that service to assert increased control that degrades their children’s relationships with their service member parent.

While National Guard, Reserve and first responder personnel usually live in closer proximity to their former partners, active duty military personnel are often “stranded” as they finish their service contracts at units and bases far from their original home of record after former partners have taken the children and returned to homes across the country and occasionally overseas. As a matter of public policy, this special population of alienated parents and children needs enhanced protections at the federal level due to the inability of far-flung state courts to adequately address the unique circumstances faced by these children and their parents.

July is thus an especially fitting month for shared parenting advocates in the United States to reflect on the National Parents Organization’s mission to “improve the lives of children and strengthen society by protecting every child's right to the love and care of both parents after separation or divorce … seek(ing) better lives for children through family court reform that establishes equal rights and responsibilities for fathers and mothers.”

As we celebrate our nation, its service personnel, and American parents this July, it’s vital that shared parenting advocates focus their legislative efforts on these special classes of children and their parents in order to ensure that those who serve our communities and our nation don’t have to choose between continued service and their responsibilities as parents.

Rob Holdsworth is the Kentucky Legislative Liaison for The Father's Rights Movement and a retired veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Rob is a friend to and supporter of NPO. He played a central role in the NPO-KY Chapter’s passage of HB 528 and ensuring that critical language protecting the parental rights of military and service personnel was included in the Bill.

Remembering the Parental Rights of Armed Service Members Stationed Abroad

By ROBERT FRANKLIN, J.D.

With Independence Day at hand, it’s important to consider the issues that face our military service members regarding divorce and child custody. Put simply, when a member of our armed services is stationed abroad, his/her ability to defend or even take part in such a case can be severely limited. Existing protections for those service members are insufficient to avoid, in some cases, quite serious miscarriages of justice.

When a parent joins the armed forces, he/she is required to establish a parenting plan that takes effect in the event that person is deployed overseas. The plan identifies who is to be the child’s primary caregiver and also names backup caregivers in the event the primary one is unable to provide care for the child.

Deployments abroad can last for months or even years. Stateside, relationships subject to such lengthy separations can attenuate and breakdown. Divorce can be the result and child custody become an important issue between the spouses. For anyone, dealing with those issues can be traumatic; for the deployed service member, doing so at a distance of thousands of miles only makes a bad situation worse. If the member is deployed to a war zone, the stress of combat and the threat to the life and physical well-being of the member adds another level of trauma to his/her divorce case back home.

Now, it is the stated policy of this country and our courts that those who have “dropped their affairs to answer their country’s call” (Le Maistre v. Leffers, 333 U.S. 1, 6 (1948)) shouldn’t be penalized back home for doing so. Accordingly, federal law provides certain protections for service members in an array of civil matters, including divorce and child custody. Those protections come in the form of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, 50 U.S.C., § 3901-4043 (SCRA) that covers many different civil actions such as mortgage foreclosures, interest rates on loans, residential lease terminations and the like.

Supposedly, the SCRA requires that any child custody arrangement in effect at the time the service member was deployed should return to effect once he/she returns home. So, during deployment, temporary arrangements may be made for the care and custody of the service member’s child, but, once the member returns, that temporary arrangement dissolves and the previous one returns to effect. Again, public policy holds that no member of the military should be penalized for serving his/her country.

I say “supposedly” because the practice in state family courts often deviates from the theory embodied in the SCRA. That deviation typically stems from the same magic words we see so often in child custody cases – “the best interests of the child.” The SCRA states that the status quo ante the deployment should return to effect once the service member returns home unless the best interests of the child dictate otherwise.

What that often means in practice is that the parent who’s remained at home caring for the child has a marked advantage over the deployed parent when it comes to custody and parenting time decisions by a state court judge. After all, so the reasoning goes, the service member may not have seen the child except possibly by Skype, for as long as two years, so why should he/she have equal parenting time with the parent who’s stayed behind, changing diapers, feeding, reading to the child, etc.?

As elsewhere, the child’s “best interests” are often interpreted to mean marginalizing a fit, loving parent. That federal law and policy argue for the parental rights of the service member makes little difference to family court judges who often aren’t educated in the social science on the very matter on which turns every decision about custody and parenting time, i.e. the child’s best interests.

Fit, loving parents should never be marginalized in the lives of their children. Using a military deployment to do so not only harms children and the parents who serve their country abroad, but thwarts the clear spirit of the SCRA as well.

The burden of proof should be changed. The service member should not be required to demonstrate that his/her continued relationship with the child promotes the child’s best interests. The parent seeking to reduce or eliminate the parent-child relationship of the service member should be required to demonstrate that such a relationship would harm the child’s interests.

On this Independence Day, let’s remember the members of our armed services and resolve to make the SCRA a real protection for the parental rights of service members stationed abroad.

Robert Franklin, J.D. is a member of the Board of Directors of National Parents Organization. Robert is an attorney, writer and frequent contributor to the NPO blog.

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